Quality of decisions
While there are cases where no decision is a very bad decision, we feel that quality of decisions is very important. Hence we also argue about it here.
As Simon A. Herbert points out in “Theories of bounded rationality”, making a quality decision have some practical limits even when the actor(s) making the decision is behaving rationally. These limits all concerned with incompleteness of information. The effects of decision alternatives can only be foreseen to a certain extent due risk or uncertainty, or incomplete information about consequences. While there arguably is an ontological difference between risk and incomplete information, in practical terms it is the same thing viewed from different angles. A notable subset of the problem is the limited ability to discover the decision space.
Our model increases decision quality by crowdsourcing the search of the decision space, and judging the quality of emerging solutions. As every individual have the right to initiate discussion about alternative approaches to problems at hand (as opposed to clean representative system), good solutions have a better probability to be discussed. For each practically important problem class there are probably people who do have relevant expertise to formulate a good solution, and it helps if they have the practical ability to share it. To judge the merits of a decision alternative and the quality of the related analysis is much easier than to come out with the analysis itself. Discussion of the alternative can bring in considerations with which the analysis and even the alternative can be modified. This also means that complex problems related to many fields also have a better chance to be solved. We also argue that humans in the course of evolution did acquire a good heuristic toolset to judge the merits of decision alternatives: those who found that the chief’s suggestion to fight the cave lion without weapons is a good idea, probably have no descendants today.
Our proposed decision process have more and longer discussion runs for decisions affecting more people (higher level nodes). Also, the expected quality of discussion is higher with the node level, as alternatives with less merits and lower quality of argumentation are expected to be filtered out in lower levels, and representatives in higher levels are expected to have more experience to find good compromises.
Another question is whether people do decide rationally. There are well-known, undisputable evidences that our evolutionary toolset do have biases. We just argue that our proposed system is better than the current one corrupted by motivations nothing to do with decision quality, and that any system involving human decisions will have the same biases. Here we would like to reflect to the ongoing debate on whether ordinary people should be trusted to make political decisions. This debate did intensify after re-election of Hungary’s Fidesz party, the Brexit referendum, and election of Donald Trump. As Noah Chomsky have pointed out, ordinary people have considerable analytical skills, what lacking is the political expertise. We again refer to the Swiss example as an evidence that people who have the means to influence politics, will obtain the necessary expertise.
Research found that process accountability also leads to better communication and decisions. Our model makes the whole decision process and all of its players fully transparent and accountable.
We propose that processes should be heavily supported by IT, because there is simply no other way to make decision making in large group effective. However the size of groups acting as the fundamental building blocks of the system makes it possible to have a tight offline bind between participants. This mitigates the negative effects of computer mediation in group decision making.